Channel talk

Channel talkers may remember that Sun chief executive Scott McNealy's new son is called Maverick, but Microsoft boss Bill Gates and his wife Melinda have resisted the temptation to give their sprog a silly name. She has given birth to a baby girl and the couple have named the child Jennifer Katherine, but that has not stopped all and sundry from taking the mickey. Some computer buffs have produced a list of similarities between the kid and Microsoft's products (Gates' other babies) which Channel Talk is not above repeating: neither can stand on their own two feet without a lot of support; although they are announced with a fanfare, almost anyone could have produced one; months pass between the announcement and the release; Bill gets the credit but someone else did the work; and for at least a year, they suck.

Beware when you're walking around your office building. Lurking just round the corner could be a Corridor Cruiser, or at least that's what Mike Lunch, GM of the IBM PC Co says. Apparently there are two types of people that use portables; the other breed is the Road Warrior. Don't worry, the Corridor Cruiser doesn't necessarily have deviant tendencies. She or he is someone who never leaves the office.

For the record, our very own Mystic Mike admits to being a bit of a Cruiser. Politically motivated hits may be nothing new in Latin America, but the Internet is bringing a different dimension to political terrorism. Shining Path, the Peruvian guerrilla movement, has launched a Web site - an unrepressed way of disseminating anti-government information, an arena for political debate and a noticeboard on which to publish death-threats to opponents. The terrorists' home page may well set the trend for insurgents worldwide - soon the armchair anarchist will be able to participate fully in the struggle, no longer fated to remain a Marxist wallflower. What next? Perhaps the IRA and MI5 can engage in a 'who's got the grooviest home page' struggle.

American company Gigastore has managed to split a small French town down the middle with accusations of fraud, money laundering, and KGB connections. Hmmm ... a faint whiff of paranoia perhaps? The trouble started when Gigastore opened up a factory in Belfort, a French industrial city near the German border. Angry unionists muttered darkly about the foreign workforce, and when a busload of Malaysian workers was caught crossing the border, accusations that Gigastore was 'trafficking in human flesh' began to fly. Before you could say '40,000 cheap disk drives please', police were crawling all over the factory and chairman Bisser Dimitrov and two local officials were charged with fraud.

Unfortunately for the French authorities, despite the wailing, gnashing of teeth and the KGB hysteria, they have been unable to find any victim of said fraud offence and have had to release the three desperate people from jail.